Page 26 of Veradel
It’s not the overabundance of food that I faced in the palace, but there’s definitely something more heartwarming about it than the bland trays of food I used to get in my housing unit as all the children jump up to grab a helping and everyone else thanks the werewolves who brought it, the spell of intensity momentarily broken.
In the shuffle, though, one of the little boys trips on an uneven floorboard and flies forward across the dusty floor.
Without thinking, I leap up and hurry forward, crouching at his side. “Are you okay?”
Sprawled out on his stomach, the boy’s eyes widen when he looks up at me with a frightened look that burns into me and makes me recoil. He cranks his head sideways and connects gazes with one of the middle-aged werewolves, who rushes forward to help him up instead.
And just like that, the food on the table doesn’t look quite as heartwarming anymore. I hurry back to my seat, fully aware that I’m only really welcome here because Lucan would demolish anyone who said otherwise. But you can’t force a kid to fake pleasantries.
Lucan leans into me, taking advantage of everyone’s attention now focused on the food to ask me in a low voice, “Are you all right?”
I realize he’s spent the second half of this pack meeting in silence, letting me speak over him even though he’s apparently their alpha. It makes me feel almost… powerful, and I allow him a smile to cover up the sick pit sinking low in my gut.
“I’m fine.” When he glowers at me, I relent with, “I just feel like I’m missing something. If I could find out more about how vampires and werewolvesfunction, then maybe I could figure out the link between the Wall and the pain you feel when you touch it.” I sigh and cast my gaze around the room, watching everyone else fill up plates with food that fill my own stomach with queasiness. When I realize Lucan’s still staring at me, the hues of his face paling slightly, I raise my eyebrows. “What?”
“I think,” he says under his breath, “you need to read my father’s journals.”
After Lucan dismisses the meeting half an hour later with orders for everyone to brainstorm our predicament, he takes me, not to his well-maintained house, but to another one farther down a beaten lane, sagging under the weight of a moss-slick roof. Overgrown trees bow over either side of it, casting it in dark, jagged shadows.
“Um.” I stop in front of the house, staring at the two broken windows that look like empty eye sockets bordered by glass teeth. “Are you sure this isn’t haunted?”
“I’m about seventy-five percent sure,” Lucan responds without even a twitch of his lips to indicate he’s joking. “Although itiswhere I used to live with my mother and father until he died. Then my mother and I both moved out, claiming other houses, because we couldn’t stand living in a place that smelled so much like him.”
“Oh.” It’s about all I can think of to say, especially when Lucan marches to the front door and the deck beneath his feet nearly splinters at his weight. He doesn’t even need to turn the knob, because the door doesn’t appear to be able to latch anyway. He simply pushes it with a flat palm, and the hinges squeak as the door slowly swings open.
“I’ve maintained his office over the years, but the rest…”
Lucan gives me an apologetic wrinkle of his nose as I follow him into the house that only has a seventy-five percent chance of being haunted, him brushing away cobwebs dangling from the doorframe before they have a chance to touch me. Chivalric, honestly. But I’m too on edge to give him more than a whispered thank you as we step inside.
Inside, abandoned furniture forms dark shadows in every corner—a sofa with clawed legs, a large, standing clock no longer ticking, a cabinet filled with trinkets covered in dust. More cobwebs sweep from the ceiling, and I swear I can hear the small pattering of rats racing along the walls somewhere. The walls themselves are covered in faded, peeling wallpaper and portraits that dangle lopsidedly, too cloaked in dust for me to make out their pictures.
“Office is this way,” Lucan says, gently leading me past a staircase I’d never want to climb and down a short hallway, where an open doorway leads to…
“Oh, this is much better.” As soon as I step into the brightly-lit room, where late sunlight streaks through a clean window facing west, I feel each of my muscles relaxing again. A large, polished desk sits on the other end between wooden cabinets, several old, leather journals scattered on its surface.
“Your father wrote in these?” I ask, grazing my fingers along a cover.
“Most of them.” Lucan watches me with an indecipherable expression. “Some of them are from my grandfather, actually, chronicling the rumors of vampire attacks on nearby villages leading up to the final invasion—Taika managed to steal them before he escaped with some other werewolves after my grandfather was killed. But my father wrote his journals after the Wall turned to stone. They’re what I was reading when you were in the Blood Moon Palace, trying to find a cure for…”
He stops, and the horrible truth seems to press into us from every wall: there is no happy ending for us, even if we can tear that Wall down. I’m still infected with vampire venom. Still going to become nothing more than a statue, sooner or later.
The thought makes me clutch the edge of the desk, my knuckles white, in an effort not to collapse. Lucan’s gaze lands on my fingers, and his brows tighten.
“We don’t have to do this right now. You barely ate anything at dinner. Maybe you should go to—”
“No, I’m not going to sleep,” I say firmly, and plop myself into the leather chair in front of the desk, already beginning to rifle through cracked, yellowed pages. In my schooling phase, all of our textbooks were glossy, pristine, and printed. These feel like the words are breathing between the pages, some ancient secret brewing just beneath my fingertips. “Maybe you missed something…”
“That one,” he says, nodding at a slightly smaller journal than the others. “Read that one.”
For the next several hours, I read while Lucan leans against the wall with his arms folded, watching me. Most of the entries just give me a sense of who his fatherwas: loud, proud, and full of the same vengeance that brewsin Lucan himself. The actual content about the Thirteenth Guardian I already knew because Lucan told me.
Until I get to an entry that reads more like a clinical study.
“You’re telling me you had this information right under your nose and youskipped over it?” I hiss, staring down at the words that swim before my vision.
I drag my finger over the worn page as I read.
October 28, 52 AX
